Customer Reviews

Cocteau: Les Enfants Terribles (CRITICAL GUIDES TO FRENCH TEXTS)

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Robin Buss is a respected French academic and translator for Penguin Classics; he has also written a number of books on French cinema, inclusing one on French film noir. You might therefore think him the ideal candidate to write an introductory monographe on 'Les Enfants Terribles', the most famous literary work by sometime filmmaker Jean Cocteau, a book famously adapted by Jean-Pierre Melville, the master of French film noir.

Buss, hilariously mocking the received (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) view of the novel as a study of four eccentric, self-destructive children wilting in a hothouse world of their own making, insists the novel must not be read according to traditional, 19th century realist expectations. He does this so often, his assumed reader must be quite dim - surely no-one reading Cocteau could confuse him with Balzac or Zola (except the English?!).

He is very good at discussing the different temporal and spatial levels in the novel, its mythical and mythological impulse, and its collapsing linear narrative into ritual and theatre. His ultimate conclusion that it is a novel about love is a bit bland, and his argument old-fashioned (and rather English); he is better at discussing the children as surrogate artists, maintaining a child-like vision of the world.

His discussion of Melville's film, however, in many ways superior to its source, is hopeless. Because it is a 'bad' transcription of Buss' interpretation of Cocteau's book, rather than the magical source of themes, images, characters and stories that would flower and underpin Melville's later work, the film is apparently a failure (Melville's use of theatrical metaphors alone are an ingenious rendering of Cocteau).

There are too many pages for for what Buss has to say, so, especially towards the end, there is a lot of padding.